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Time to move the goalposts?
By McGreevy
Northern Ireland, to paraphrase Charles Haughey, is a failed footballing entity.
No other conclusion can be drawn from the Old Trafford trouncing handed out by England on Saturday.
Northern Ireland were lucky to get nil; England unlucky not to get six or seven which they surely would have done had it not been for the excellence in the first-half of goalkeeper Maik Taylor, one of only two players on his team playing regular Premiership football.
Northern Ireland are now 111th in the FIFA rankings behind such luminaries of world football as Turkmenistan, Burkina Faso, Gabon and Rwanda.
They haven’t produced a world-class footballer since Norman Whiteside. Last year they were just four minutes away from the most protracted goal drought in the history of international football until David Healy scored against Norway.
This ought to give the Irish Football Association some pause for thought, but there was Chief Executive Howard Wells last week pooh-poohing George Best’s rare moment of lucidity.
Best called for a united Irish football team saying that from time to time both countries will produce world-class footballers and it makes sense to pool our resources.
Of course it does, but not as far as Wells is concerned.
“George can sit there making comments he’s made before but it’s not on anyone’s agenda,” he said.
If not, why not? A united Ireland football team is not a matter of politics, although lots will see it that way, it’s a matter of pragmatism.
Football is the most competitive game on earth and it makes no sense to dissipate our precious resources the way we've been doing for so long.
At present only about five players from Northern Ireland would make it into the Republic’s squad: Maik Taylor and Roy Carroll could cover for goalkeeper Shay Given, Aaron Hughes and Damien Johnson would make it as utility defenders/midfielders and Leeds United’s David Healy might augment the paucity of striking options we have at present.
Not one of these players, though, would be an automatic first choice for an all-Ireland football team.
That’s said in as much sorrow as smugness because, as the performance against Israel demonstrated, we’re no world-beaters either.
Right now a united Ireland football team wouldn’t look much different to the team that the Republic fields at the moment, but it won’t always be like that.
The FAI and IFA remain the only partitionist sporting organisations. An Irish rugby player doesn’t represent the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, neither does a boxer, a swimmer or a runner (except in the Commonwealth Games).
The kernel of the response from both associations is that we have two football teams because it's the way things have always been done.
That’s an excuse, not a reason. The FAI and IFA are so entrenched in their own petty fiefdoms that they refuse to contemplate the big picture.
They are so terrified of offending each other that they won’t even open up tentative discussions. It’s the footballing elephant in the drawing room.
It isn’t just international football that has suffered. Domestic football on both sides of the border has been fatally weakened by sporting partition.
To that end, the recently inaugurated Setanta Cup, which pits the best of the North against the South, provides a sliver of hope for the future.
Last week the Eircom League champions Shelbourne and Glentoran played out a marvellous 3-3 draw in front of 5,000 spectators at Tolka Park.
The real test will come when Linfield, with their rabid Loyalist support, venture south.
The Setanta Cup will be a success if (a) trouble can be avoided and (b) the public imagination is captured by a tournament which could metamorphose into the first meaningful all-Ireland football championship.
If common cause can be found domestically, who knows what might happen after that?
No one is claiming it would be easy. Most of us remember the rancid hatred that emanated from the terraces of Windsor Park in November 1993 when the Republic needed to draw to qualify for the World Cup finals.
It might be exceedingly hard indeed to change the mindset of some of the North’s most rabid supporters (only six per cent of whom are Catholics by the way).
The depressing thing is that there is no meaningful debate, no forum, no way that supporters on either side of the border can at least talk about something that won’t go away despite the fervent wishes of vested interests.
The case is closed as some would want us to believe, but it isn’t and it never will be.
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